Mike Edelhart

Mike Edelhart is Managing Partner for Social Starts and Joyance Partners VC partnerships. A pioneering media and startup executive, Mike was the original Executive Editor of PC Magazine. Mike has been CEO at many startups, including Olive Software, Inman News and Zinio. Mike has also consulted to Bloomberg, Reuters and AARP, and has authored more than 20 books.

We base our funds around deep research and evaluating lots of new companies. As a result, we can discern trends in tech and human behavior, sometimes long before they become widely recognized. Here are some of the most impactful trends we see right now: Merchant prince and media king: One person. In the past, media and […]

Health is a remarkable area for early-stage investment. It shows more activity, more exits, more corporate involvement, and more overall value over the past five years than any other segment. However, it is also an extremely crowded area; the number of active health investors has more than doubled to more than 1500. There has also […]

The Twittersphere and blog landscape have been aflame at year’s end about a slowdown in seed investing. The amount of money going into seed deals has dipped, but the number of seed deals being done has fallen dramatically over the past two years. There isn’t much question that this slowdown is real. The numbers are […]

I judged Viet Challenge, a startup competition of Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American entrepreneurs, last weekend. The featured speaker was Tri Tran, who came to the US as a boat person after the Vietnam War and has had great success here as a startup executive. As Tran noted, he has been part of startups at every phase. His […]

As moment-of-inception investors, we often participate in convertible notes or SAFEs. These allow early-stage investors to support companies at a point too early to know their real market value. The price is only established when the note converts into shares at a future financing round. Notes and SAFEs have a long established structure. The investment […]

We see an impending tech-driven revolution in food, top to bottom. Agriculture and raw materials are being transformed as sensors, and AI can predict crop yields, water availability, and even turn soil into a system that self-reports on its own health.

We think augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality (AR, VR, and XR) experiences that blend the digital and physical worlds have enormous potential across a wide range of use cases in both corporate and consumer settings. However, the current picture for AR/VR/XR is murky. We feel it is still early for AR/VR/XR as a […]

Humans, like computers, are both hardware and software. Human hardware consists of cells, bones, blood, all the physical stuff that comprises our bodies and their many systems. Human software is psychology, mood – the world of our mind and emotions, as opposed to simply our brains. In terms of technology, humans-as-hardware solutions include advances in […]

A while back, I did a post of quotations that inspired me as I built my career. It stimulated a lot of attention and feedback. So, here, is part 2 of Words to Entrepreneur By. These are quotes that readers and friends have suggested, or that I have come across in the time since the original post. […]

My last post delved darkly into the Seven Deadly Startup Sins. Now, in the spirit of optimism and fair play, let’s turn our eyes to the light and consider the cardinal virtues early stage companies should cleave to: Chastity. In this case, I don’t mean sexuality. Chastity implies using courage and boldness to drive toward moral […]